Welcome to the Boston Better Beer Bureau, our latest incarnation of the trusty suds reporting we’ve done at DigBoston ever since people referred to beer as suds. Really, we remember the days when we’d spend half our checks on fancy German bottles just so that we could review them, whereas these days breweries from all around New England kindly send us samplers and stay in touch. The BBBB is a new attempt to return that love, all while sharing more news about the innumerable microbreweries and pubs among us. Here’s a dispatch from a new favorite place. YOU CAN SIGN UP FOR OUR SPECIAL BBBB EMAIL LIST HERE
Nothing but craft perfection, from the Oak Bar to Waltham
There’s always way more news brewing inside the beer world than we can dream of digesting. Let alone write about. So before these notes from our past couple of weeks of imbibing go stale, here they are, barely smoothed over and in no recognizable order…
We hope you have been as lucky as we’ve been to catch some Mighty Squirrel Cloud Candy on tap in several places. It’s smooth in ways that the beer’s absolutely perfect moniker merely begins to explain, a rush of citrus IPA straight out of Waltham but with serious potential to turn heads all across the nation. These New England numbers are getting increasingly competitive, and so it’s sweet to see spots like the new Beat Brew Hall pouring so damn many of them.
The Cambridge brew hall is the latest reinvention of the space most recently known as Beat Brasserie, run by the team behind the Beehive in the South End. The bar staff competently led us through a range of thrilling overtures, as did the experts later the same evening at the Oak Long Bar + Kitchen at the Fairmont Copley Plaza, an unlikely utopia for people who like beer as much as Judge Brett Kavanaugh and a preferred hangout for guys who behave and look like him.
Despite being among the most polished joints in Boston, the Cloud Candy is eight bucks at the Oak Bar just like it would be virtually anywhere else. It’s especially worth it here, though, since the taps are made of gold and diamonds. The selections are worth tarring the economy for—we sipped a solid and determined Zero Gravity Little Wolf American Pale Ale, an always-reliable SingleCut Plain Top Pils, and a Virtuoso hazy double IPA from Lord Hobo that won’t stop showing up in our dreams.
We also drank an interesting and worth revisiting Mighty Squirrel Peach Smoovy for $12, which you are able to cop in a can. In all our years reviewing beers, we never thought we would be able to kick it inside the Fairmont Copley and tilt back aluminum, but that’s the modern world we live in. Might as well embrace it.
Finally, with summer ending and another trip to Maine so many months away, we’d like to wave a temporary goodbye to our buds at D.L. Geary Brewing. Their concoctions keep us lit whenever we can make it north, and they must know it. You have to have some serious product to call yourself the first craft brewery in all of New England, and Geary’s pulls it off. The Riverside IPA—which, if you squint while opening a tallboy of it and stick your nose near the chute, feels a lot like smashing your face into an enormous pillow stuffed with oranges—is a case in point.
In fact, make that five cases to hold us over through the winter.
Dig Staff means this article was a collaborative effort. Teamwork, as we like to call it.
